Newton-Wellesley Hospital
Newton, MA

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Newton-Wellesley, with JJWild's support, successfully migrates to MEDITECH MAGIC OSAL on the Windows 2000 platform

Newton-Wellesley Hospital (NWH), a 249-bed acute care community hospital located in Newton, Massachusetts, provides health services to the western suburbs of Boston. It is a non-profit organization offering patients a wide range of medical, surgical, obstetric, psychiatric, pediatric, and subspecialty care. The hospital medical staff includes nearly 1,000 physicians practicing a full range of specialties.

The move to MAGIC OSAL

NWH is a long-time user of MEDITECH HCIS software and relies on it for a substantial percentage of its information technology requirements. NWH uses most of MEDITECH’s clinical and all of its financial an administrative applications. Recently, the hospital beta tested and brought into production the new MEDITECH OSAL (Operating System Abstraction Layer) platform on Compaq ProLiant™ Intel-based machines running Microsoft® Windows® 2000. The new systems were integrated and are supported by JJWild.

The next generation of feature-rich stability

The OSAL system is the result of MEDITECH’s decision to port MAGIC to run as an executable in the Windows 2000 environment. From an operational standpoint, the new implementation looks like a MAGIC machine and is completely interoperable with previous generations of MAGIC. Mike Belkner is director of development in the research and development group at MEDITECH. Starting in the summer of 2000, he led the team that created the new product. “What we’ve done,” Mike says, “is a necessary step in maintaining the legendary stability of the MAGIC operating system while enabling it to interface with the wide range of peripherals available in the Windows 2000 environment.”

When asked “what’s in it for the customer” he replied that “the benefits of running on Windows 2000 include seamless device driver support, the use of a wide range of industry-standard hardware platforms and management tools, and MEDITECH’s ability to select best-of-breed Windows software from our partners and easily integrate it with MAGIC. This will be particularly important for acceleration of innovation and creation of advanced features for storage area networks and centralized management throughout the healthcare enterprise. We’re very excited about MAGIC OSAL and the benefits it will deliver for years to come.”

MAGIC OSAL beta testing began in April and one of the first test sites was Newton-Wellesley Hospital.

Managing the move

Terri Urciuolo, Project Manager, Technology and Integration, has been an IT professional at Newton-Wellesley Hospital since 1989 and was responsible for managing the migration to MAGIC OSAL on Windows 2000. She says that the hospital administration has always been very supportive of information technology, “not just for the sake of technology, but for implementing tools and solutions that help people do their jobs and do them better.”

From test to full production

After a six-week beta-test period, NWH smoothly cut over to full production on the four major machines in the MAGIC OSAL environment on September 23, 2001, supporting around 1,000 concurrent users and devices. Terri is very impressed with the performance and stability of the new platform. “We are running our nightly backups in a third of the time it took before. And the payroll department is especially happy since they’ve cut the running time of one of their key programs from two hours to fifteen minutes. Plus, redundant power supplies, fans, and hot-swappable universal disk drives give us the high reliability that the hospital environment demands.”

JJWild’s integrated platforms

NWH Hospital’s platform is based on the JJWild SixGun™ package that delivers from one to six pre-integrated Compaq ProLiant servers and their associated Compaq storage devices in a single, space-saving rack-mount footprint. NWH had JJWild adapt the configuration to its requirements for disaster tolerance with two geographically separate computer rooms. At this point, each room has an OSAL rack with three systems as well as two free-standing Compaq AlphaServer machines. Applications are split across the ten systems, with one acting as the master MIS node. Terri says that during this fiscal year NWH may replace the remaining Alpha machines with more Compaq OSAL units that will easily slide into the existing racks.

JJWild sets the standard

NWH turned to JJWild to get the new systems running smoothly. Terri says that JJWild was “quick in delivering and getting them set up. The fact that JJWild is MEDITECH’s preferred Compaq vendor is a big advantage. They have people who work very closely with MEDITECH. You don’t get that from other vendors.” She was particularly impressed with “the great job and hard work” of JJWild field engineer Mike Wheeler. With JJWild since 1994, Mike has participated in dozens of MAGIC installs. He says that because the MAGIC OSAL product runs on Intel-based hardware platforms, it will give customers a higher level of investment protection.
Terri is sold on the JJWild SixGun platform. She says that it is “a neat, self-contained package that sets the standard for what I will expect to see from any vendor in the future.”

JJWild and MAGIC OSAL on Windows 2000

The JJWild engineering staff has worked closely with MEDITECH in enabling system configurations for alpha and beta testing of MAGIC OSAL on Windows 2000. Customers familiar with MAGIC who select DAS storage will appreciate the minimal effort, smooth startup afforded by careful pre-integration of Windows 2000 and the MAGIC OSAL Console.

Customers selecting SAN storage or needing conversion assistance can take advantage of our years of MEDITECH system engineering expertise, unmatched in the industry. For the first generation of MAGIC OSAL on Windows 2000 server architecture, MEDITECH has specified an integrated DLT Tape Drive per server. This will allow customers to load data created on other Magic-supported servers with DLT technology quickly and easily. JJWild can assist with conversions from other formats.

Using an Open Systems, enterprise-level approach, we will be there to work with you when it’s time to review and extend your systems, SAN, network, and peripheral infrastructure. MEDITECH recently acknowledged our technical competency and partnership by naming JJWild Preferred Integrator. We are committed to building long lasting customer relationships with high levels of service.

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